Month: April 2018

Apparently a significant minority of young Chinese have been sufficiently inspired by the 1999 David Fincher / Brad Pitt movie to set up more than 8000 Fight Clubs across the country. To me, this shows how East and West popular culture is a (Han-style) hall of mirrors in which westerners are beguiled into studying martial arts in isolated rural areas that may have existed as much in ritual, on stage and silver screen as the battlefield , while their Chinese counterparts are inspired by a gritty, hyperreal urban US satire (which lets not forget, ends with a Bruce Lee homage) to trade leather in dingy, graffiti daubed supermarket basements

Looking forward to reading Antonio Graceffo’s book on Shuai Jiao. This article highlights some of his main points: in particular the decline of Shuai Jiao in China relative to other less violent sports, and his theory that the lack of pinning in Shuai Jiao has contributed to the resistance of China to MMA

To all those people who said the Wing Chun guy lost because the MMA guy was bigger…. I could show you many many bouts from MMA where a smaller guy fights a bigger one while retaining his skill levels. For example: Cain Velasquez (111kg) vs Brock Lesnar (130kg)

Fascinating interview with Maija Soderholm who is one of the very few inheritors of Sonny Umpad’s Visayan Escrima system….what makes this so interesting is that Sonny insisted Maija never teach set patterns. Rather his method as she now passes it on, is ‘alive’ from day one: once you’ve learned to not get hit, only then do you treat the fight like a series of problems to be solved, centring on the importance of reading your opponent and then getting your them to do what you what you want them to, either through feints, set ups or downright psychological trickery…What’s more, these lessons in ‘fight IQ’ constitute a meta-methodology that can be applied to any fighting system or range…http://randykinglive.com/podcast/ep-49-maija-soderholm-author-of-the-liar-the-cheat-and-the-thief